THIS WEEK'S BOOKS
THERE have been many books written lately on how to write, nearly all of them being either directions on how to supply what can be easily marketed or subterranean meditations by writers who were anxious to relieve themselves by analysing their own literary birth pangs. It is very 'refreshing to read Mrs. Wharton on The Writing of Fiction (Scribner). It is a direct and thoughtful piece of communication ; a little book consisting of chapters on fiction and its development in general ; on telling a short story ; on character and situa- tion in the novel ; and on Marcel Proust. It would be difficult to summarize or take extracts from the book—it is so well knit—but here is one passage in which Mrs. Wharton is actually giving direct advice :-
to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fire, but must under-
" The short story writer must not only know from what angle stand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak, and applied to it those laws of perspective which Paolo Uccello called so beautiful,' before it can be offered to the reader as a natural unembellished fragment of experience, detached like a ripe fruit from the tree. The moment the writer begins to grope in the tangle of his ' material,' to hesitate between one and another of the points that any actual happening thrusts up in such dis- orderly abundance, the reader feels a corresponding hesitancy, and the illusion of reality vanishes."
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